Facebook has hit a wall – the people running the company don’t know it yet

The situation in which the hi-tech giants of the online world find themselves still baffles me.

Careful lawyers and executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter gave lengthyevidence to the US Congress yesterday without once appearing to appreciate the scale of the trouble they’re in. If they believe that their scale, profits and lobbying power is going to insulate them from a patchwork of inconsistent regulation all over the globe, they are making a mistake.

Russian interference and faked news are serious issues, to be sure. But they make only a fragment of the questions raised by social networks. Others go wider and deeper. I’ve been writing a good deal about Facebook recently and this post is a short summary of those arguments, plus links.

Jay Rosen observed the other day that Facebook has found no way to talk about its power. That’s one way to put it. I’d say that Facebook simply hasn’t faced how to reconcile how it makes money with the public interest. The session in Congress yesterday only underlined that. A defensive crouch is not the right posture for thinking.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2017 at 11:45 am and is filed under Media Freedom, Social Media, Standards, World.
You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.